Plastic LRT rail ties built for winter.
Hardy product handles freeze-thaw cycle
By using light rail transit ties made of old detergent bottles and milk jugs, the City of Edmonton has diverted 68,000 kilograms of plastic away from landfills.
The city is using ties made of 100-per-cent recycled plastic to replace the current wooden structures at points where an LRT line intersects with 66th Street, 82nd Street, 112th Avenue and 129th Avenue.
Railway ties are typically wooden or concrete cross-braces that support the rails.
Besides being friendly to the environment, Ecotrax ties are better-suited to Edmonton’s cold, northern climate than wooden products, according to Axion, the New Jersey-based supplier of the product.
“In Canada, with the many freeze-thaw cycles that you guys have and the wet environment, water absorbs into wood and when it freezes, it expands and begins to rapidly deteriorate,” said Cory Burdick, sales manager at Axion. “With composite ties, they’re not porous so they don’t absorb any water and we’re unaffected by your freeze-thaw cycles.”
Deteriorating wooden ties are especially problematic at road crossings where water and salt gets trapped under the concrete panels, Burdick said.
“I’m sure you’ve been over plenty of railroad crossings where you’ve thought it was going to rip the bottom of your car out because it was so uneven.
“Because our product is a little bit premium-priced over wood, it really pays off in those specialty applications like crossings, turnouts, where the trains switch tracks and you have longer ties, and on bridges where costs are high to do maintenance.”
Chris Nelson, supervisor of transit facilities for Edmonton Transit, said the north-line grade crossings are about 20 years old and need rehabilitation. Installation costs for the crossings will total about $1.4 million.
“The cost of the (composite) ties is about 30 per cent more than a wood tie, but that’s a pretty small fraction of the overall project cost, which is mostly labour for installation of the crossing itself,” Nelson said.
“If we can extend the life of the crossing by any amount of years, then we’re actualizing a significant cost savings there.”
Because the plastic ties are more uniform, installing them is easier than wooden ones.
The structural-grade recycled plastic was developed using waste products about 15 years ago by Rutgers University. Axion has licensed the technology from Rutgers to build railroad ties. Edmonton is Axion’s third Canadian customer. Calgary Transit also uses the product.
Most of Axion’s products are found on freight railroads but business is growing among U.S. public-transit lines that want to market green initiatives, Burdick said.